Akira Kurasawa

I was tempted to do imagine a Kurasawa version of Highlander, but that would be too easy. Just add extra decapitations, dismemberments, and gallons of blood.

Instead, let's look at how much he does with colors and lighting. I'll start with Stray Dog. Here we have light, gray tones that emphasize the heat. It's black and white, so he can't do much with color, but the rough grays almost seem to give it a dusty orange color. The lighting and composition are so well controlled that you can forget that it is all in black and white.

Next, there's Yojimbo. Kurasawa controls the lighting and composition well again, but he puts much more emphasis on contrasting the black and white in the frame rather than pushing a lot of gray. For example, the shots that take place in the hut while Sanjuro is recovering have a lot of contrast between shadows and small strips of light. In fact, it seems like the light in those shots are shadows cast by the darkness. Those darker shots set the tone and intensity as the film stops making jokes and heads toward the conclusion.

Finally, we've got Ran. Ran had color. Color is good. Kurasawa made good use of color in several ways. The dynamics of the battle scenes were organized and clarified by giving the different sides their own colors. That simplified what would have been chaotic shots. He also used color to set the mood. In the beginning of the movie, the entire landscape is green and blue; nice, calm, bright colors. In the last scene, the entire landscape is this dull orange, lit up by a sunset at the horizon. The shot gives us a sense of a somber conflict.

Basically, Kurasawa did a fantastic job using colors and lighting in his movies. They set the tone and organized the composition of the shots.